The family is here. Yesterday I took them out for tapas.
The only photo from the tapas bars as I was too busy stuffing my face.
For the first time I tried squid. Not battered squid rings but actual fried and left whole on your plate squid. It was very nice.
At the end of the week I head back to the Homeland for some catching up, cooling down and a wedding.
The thing’s I am mostly looking forward to in my three weeks in the UK are cheap stores, cheap video games, sandwich delis, cordon bleu (+mash), KFC, McMuffins and thick based pizzas.
Outside of food I’m looking forward to the weather. Despite living in a country most Brits visit for their hols and living in weather conditions most Brits want, constant 30+c heat is not all it’s cracked up to be. I really can’t wait for a little bit of rain R&R.
It’s also going to be good catching up with old friends.
My last two visits to the UK I’ve not really tried to get hold of anyone, well my last visit was only for 2 days so I couldn’t. This time round I’ve sent numerous requests on facebook to catch up with old friends.
And there is where I’ve come to notice some differences between how me and my friends arrange drinks/nights out and how the missus and co do their planning.
The missus will (and has) had most of her visit back all planned out. What she is doing, with who and when. This has been done for months. In London due to the sheer size of things, location, commutes, friend circles, office hours it can be hard to pin down friends.
Where I’m from in a small town up North that’s not how we roll. Everything is last minute. In fact you could just call up a friend and actually go out and meet them later that day. I know it might sound like a crazy idea to those reading this in the capital but it can happen.
Sometimes this annoys the missus as she likes to know what is happening and I always tell her nothing is planned (she has not learnt not to ask this and just go with things)
Although this way of thinking was made more apparent when I recently got in touch with some friends about meeting up in less then two weeks time.
Exhibit 1. Having told a friend I will be back in Runcorn next week he assumed I meant the following day and arranged a date. We just don’t think about making dates that far in advance.
Exhibit. Having told second friend that I will be back next week, his reply is to not even think about making a date and arranging it later. We just don’t consider making dates this far in advance.
Apart from all that, I’ve read up on advice for some deep and very long Japanese RPG game (Final Fantasy III) for my DS and stuck a few seasons of Family guy on my N95 as well as some new albums (if you haven’t heard them already I strongly recommend you check out Girl Talk and Santigold) which should cover all my time on planes, trains and automobiles.
All that is left is to pack the suitcase.
So I have my dad and his family visiting from Saturday. It should be good. Their visit coincides with Semana Santa (Easter Week). There will be a lot of parades with men in cloaks and pointy hats (yes, like they look like those kind of pointy hats) carrying creepy statues of Jesus and other various things happening all week. This is also the only fiesta/parade that I have yet to experience since being in Spain. So now I can mark off the last one.
And expect quite a few photos.
Another favourite habit of mine when people come to visit, and I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, is I turn in to “Vacation Mode.”
I’ll do a lot of things I don’t normally do, like eat out (although me and the missus have been doing tapas nights out again quite recently), go to the beach in average weather (average to me maybe, but there are a lot of holiday makers walking around in shorts and vests) and just generally walking around the main part of town really slowly (damn it tourists, pick up the pace).
I’m also looking forward to showing off my new favourite place El Molino.
Unlike other touristy flamenco bars which do big shows with all the dresses and proper dancers, El Molino is 90%+ filled with the Spanish. It has a solo guitarist/singer who performs on a very small stage and then anyone in the bar can join him on stage and dance to his music. And after a few drinks no one is shy.
I learned about El Molino when we first arrived but never went to it. Not sure why. I was taken to El Molino last week and had a fantastic time in there and wondered why I never went to it sooner? Although I plan to make up missed opportunities.
But I do need to work on my rhythmic hand clapping a bit more.
And if I'm ballsy enough I might start watching some youtube teach yourself Flamenco dance lessons....
or perhaps not.
Clapclap-CLAP. Clapclap-CLAP. Clapclap-CLAP.
Our second week in England was a lot more quieter and calmer. It was good to have a power shower back (the one problem about staying in my mums is that her shower has as much pressure as a balloon). Although the missus parents shower can sometimes be TOO power shower and take off a limb.
We do do a lot of playing out in London and my alcohol tolerance had improved somewhat so I was able to not get too drunk, phew.
But there was a lot of pointing...
The missus points
I point
And kissing (maybe too many festive parties was the problem)
The missus friends kiss
I kiss not one...
but two friends.
And my friend kisses the barmaid (which is often referred to as a "normal night out."
Look, presents
I did get a present of my friend, some marbles, which we then played in the corner of the bar. I won. Of course.
But there was also even better times at the missus which included eating Christmas Roasts!
Tuck in
But then it was time to leave. And after booking an additional suitcase on the return flight due to the missus clothes shopping and Christmas presents we went the airport.
Our plane
And I decided to play about with the missus present a little more.
Big plane taking off
And after horrible horrible weather all week, catching two mini colds and having a horrible runny nose we arrived back to Spain to find this.
Hardly a cloud in sight
And this is the view from the coach off the coast as we pulled back in to Nerja
Glad to be back
Slideshow from two weeks
But despite having missed all my family and friends for the last year and all the fun I had in those two weeks in England I am really pleased to be back in Spain.
My short week in Runcorn was pretty insane.
I'm unsure whether I like flying anymore? I used to love flying loads. But my last few trips have been plagued by cramped conditions (although the missus forward thinking prebooked us extra leg room on one journey) and getting very dry eyes and mouth from the recycled air.
But there is still something childishly exciting about being a few thousand feet in the air flying over cities.
But I'm quite sad to say the very first thing we did when we arrived in to Manchester was to head to the nearest McDonalds. You can take the man out of England but you can't take English out of the man (or something like that)
Trying to squeeze in seeing my mum was a hard task as she had made plans to go to Leeds for two days and Liverpool for one whole day during the six days I returned from Spain.
Trying to get work (we work from home and in this case holiday) done while having two screaming and very loud kids in the house was really difficult (although easily more managed when one of them went back to school).
Almost as difficult as trying to find a place to put our laptops.
Count 'em. Five laptops.
Most of my time though was spent catching up with my 10 month old nephew, who misses out on sharing a birthday with my by 24 hours.
And we did get a lot of photos of him including
Him enjoying his new booster chair so he can have toast at the table like everyone else.
And his thoughts on girls....or Chelsea's awful awful home game against Cluj (I was making pretty much the same face at that game)
In my first week my poor tolerence of alcohol seemed to take over when I had to cut short a night out with a friend after only two drinks due to meeting up with my dad earlier that afternoon for a few pints.
And I'm pretty sure one very slurred conversation over curry with another friend. But that one is ok as it wasn't just me that was drunk.
Although good things do come from drinking with my dad, including this Holiday season Christmas card-esque photo
I did spend some time in Liverpool myself so the missus could do exactly 1.75 hours worth of shopping before exploding at the sheer amount of people cashing in on early sales.
I got to see my stepbrother who I hadn't seen in a while. Almost swear at a few bus drivers, first one closed the doors and drove off just as we were about to get on. Second one was driving close to the speed of sound on the way back.
And we also spotted this guy out early
Aren't there supposed to be reindeers?
But almost too quickly my time was over and we had to head down South to the missus parents. Although we almost saved the best till last.
We got first class tickets down to London and enjoyed lots of free foods and drinks, loads of leg room and more importantly lots of peace and quite and calm.
Since coming back to England I've gotten less sleep then normal, drank more alcohol in the last few days then in the last few weeks (not just thanks to me dad)
You will be able to see that we do have some milk and cheese in there for tea and the missus does have her own drink as well. That lonely little Smirnoff.
Also it's been freezing here. And as I kind of threw out most of my clothes before leaving for Spain I didn't have many warm clothes.
In fact all I had were three jumpers.
And I shrunk one when at me mums.
Which now leads to, I have had a cold (or flu, don't know which?) which weirdly only lasted a few hours but made me feel really run down and horrible last night.
Although a few of the good points are opening presents early. Including the missus brand spanking new camera which has a pretty cool supermacro mode.
Click for a bigger picture were you can see all the leg hairs. Maybe this fly was a little too scared of hearing of a Venus.
I do want to try and take some photos of the moon with the 18x zoom but not until I have some warmer clothes.
(posted here due to missus using the unhelpful wordpress platform)
this is how good i am at charades
not only am i good
im so good i can get a 5 or 6 year old to do a charade and get it guessed in one go
see
can you guess what the answer is?
actual answer will be posted later
I have my family visiting next week. I'm looking forward to it, it's been a while since I've ate out in restaurants or had a few quiet drinks over tapas so it's good to have a reason.
I received an email off my sister asking if I could give her details on where they were staying so she could show my niece a map of how to get from their rental to my house.
After a few set backs with the details in the email I was able to finally locate where they were staying and got a map sorted out.
Now everything below HAS NOT been modified in any way. I haven't tried to change the direction of instructions given by Google, you know how you can "Add a destination" to Google directions.
I've just asked for the quickest directions from "Calle de Lucena, 29780, Nerja, Spain"--holiday rental--to "Calle de Canarjas"--my house. You can check it out for yourself.
Here is what comes up.
View Larger Map
Now the bit I am interested in is the bit just next to my house.
That's a strange direction.
Now this bit is the EXACT same bit that I jumped from 6 months ago on the second day we lived here. And we know what happened then! I bashed and bruised my foot and had major problems walking for weeks afterwards.
Now I'm not falling for this trick. I know that it's dangerous taking that route. And I think I'll be making sure to stop my niece from going that way too.
But my foot is good now.
